


Living in the shadows of reality

by acel



Category: SHINee
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-12
Updated: 2015-10-12
Packaged: 2018-04-25 14:08:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,283
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4963618
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/acel/pseuds/acel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Taemin, the philosophy student, wonders if this is all there is.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Living in the shadows of reality

**Author's Note:**

  * In response to a prompt by [acel](https://archiveofourown.org/users/acel/pseuds/acel) in the [ateliers2015](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/ateliers2015) collection. 



> Inspired by W.B. Yeats' Among School Children and a scene from Haruki Murakami's Kafka on the Shore.

Pythagoras believed that the essence of being lay in numbers. Behind God, man and nature, everything – could be affixed to geometrical symbols and perpendiculars. It’s a bit far-fetched, really, but some could attribute it to the unique way he saw the world as a mathematical aesthetic. Maybe the task left for us, then, is simply to wonder.

I’m naked and tangled in the bedsheets, the warm red-orange sun filtering through the Venetian blinds and bleeding onto my bare toes. Minho guides my hand between his legs. He is laying down next to me and closes his eyes as he wraps my fingers around his length. It’s almost amusing to watch how his cheeks begin to flush just as I start to stroke him. I touch him lightly at first because it’s the teasing that gets him shivering under me. Eventually he decides he’s had enough, and he topples over me effortlessly, a testament to his mornings training at the gym and he pulls off his shirt with familiar ease.

I stare, almost vacantly, at the dirty white ceiling hanging over us right beyond his shoulder as he lowers onto me. “First there was Plato, then Aristotle, then Pythagoras...”

Minho momentarily pauses from kissing my neck, his soft, jet black curls brushing against my jawline. “Don’t study for your philosophy exam here,” he murmurs, “I’ll go limp.”

He enters you as if you were a pliant doll. He’s giving and giving. You feel his touch running up and down your thigh until he gently coaxes you open. You have a beautiful body, he whispers between butterfly kisses that trail down your torso. Knowing him, he probably utters the same exact phrase to all the girls who’s ever been under him. But you’re too caught up in the rush to dwell on it; he’d sliding inside you and you stay still and you let him, slap of skin against skin, bare and sweaty chests sliding against each other, then suddenly; you feel like you’re on the edge of the world, the peak of Everest; and he pulls out and comes on your stomach.

He wipes up the mess with a tissue, ties up the condom and throws it into the bin. I bend over the bedside table and to take out a Menthol and my lighter. I offer him a cigarette but he shakes his head no, as always, because he needs to preserve his health for soccer. I slowly settle back into my sheets, pulling it up to cover my bare torso. Meanwhile, he shuts the door of the bathroom behind him as I take a drag I’m left with the sound of the water running in the sink. The embers of my cigarette burn red-hot with coiled wisps of smoke trailing up into the air. It’s almost hypnotic, the way smoke disperses out like tree branches before diffusing into a soft haze. But mostly I’m just tired, and I need to mindlessly concentrate on something.

The toilet flushes, and Minho emerges from the bathroom, some droplets of water still falling off his face.

“Did you know,” I begin, “According to Plato, we’re living in the shadows of reality. That is, the ideal world."

“I don’t get it,” he says, wiping his face with a towel.

“There are two worlds. The real and the ideal. We’re stuck in the ideal world because we always experience the world with our senses, but in fact there’s the real world – the physical world – which we can only intellectually grasp, but not feel.”

“What the fuck?” he jokes, then adds, “I’d feel sorry for whoever you start dating because you’ll start talking about thousand year old dead men in the middle of a fuck.”

“It’s for my philosophy exam,” I lie. “I study by teaching others.”

In the meantime he picks up his clothes from the corner of the bed and slides into them clumsily. He nods barely, feigning understanding and slumps back on the bed with the phone in hand.

He’s now leaning against the wall which is littered with flakes of peeling plaster. I roll lazily onto my stomach but I don’t try to get closer to him or touch him at all – if anything, it’s probably a little strange for him to settle back into my bed so easily, as if he belonged there at all. But mostly it’s because I feel a little repulsed after sex, not by the act itself - the air is still a hazy mixture of the scents of sex infused with smoke – and I don’t mind that. Maybe it’s a strange repulsion for the person himself – maybe repulsion is too strong of a word, maybe it’s just a mere unwillingness, the feeling amplified precisely because we were moving in tandem together just moments before, the rhythm of our heavy breaths joined together as one. In the intimate act of sex it’s as if you are sharing some part of your soul, in the moment of exhilaration, as if fireworks were erupting inside you. But when the air simmers down and I observe my peeling wall, the whited ceiling, and the mess of clothes strewn about and I wonder, is this it?

“Pythagoras theorised about the ‘music of spheres’. Do you know what that is?” A rhetorical question. “Barely perceptible musical notes originate from the orbit of the Sun and the Moon.”

Minho still remains without reaction, continuing to scroll down his smartphone like programmed clockwork. This is nothing new; Minho is a biology major and in his words, “philosophy sounds like a load of bullshit that goes in one ear and out the other”, then always modifying his statement with “but that’s just for me at least you know– I’m sure you get a lot out of philosophy” without fail. I know he and I would hate hanging out together. We would be terrible boyfriends to each other. It seems like fucking is the only thing we can do when we’re alone, without the silences hanging over us like a guillotine on timer.

“This creates a symphony of sounds. And we can deduce this. Mathematically,” and I begin to crawl to him, my fully naked body climbing over his fully clothed body.

“What are you doing?” he says. I move in between his legs. We are probably, I think, an accident of proximity.

“Do you want to come again? Mathematically, of course.” I’m fiddling with the zipper of his pants.

Minho half-chuckles, half-something-else as he brushes my wandering hands away dismissively. “You think you’re so funny but you’re really not.”

This is my cue to wordlessly settle back into my side of the bed as if nothing’s happened. I curl into myself and try to mentally bury myself into my sheets. Outside, the sun retires into the skyline, drenching the world with a demure blue glow. The world looks like the sea, and we, the fish, trapped in coral skyscrapers.

Eventually he gets up and grabs his bag, phone still in hand.

“Won’t you stay?” I murmur. A desperate attempt. What am I even trying to do? Nothing. Cue applause for Taemin, the naked one who anxiously drapes his pale torso with white sheets. The funny thing is, I don’t even know why I’m acting like I’ve been spurned.

He looks puzzled more than anything. “I have work, remember?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll text you later. Bye,” he says and the door shuts.

No one can possibly expect to find metaphysical reward for physical euphoria. Trying to rationalise the arcane philosophies of life is like grasping a slippery ice cube in your hands until it melts away under your fingers, leaving behind a chilling aftertaste that you once held onto something solid.


End file.
